Amber O'Connell

UC Santa Cruz Department of Computer Engineering

Welcome to my website. Gotta be honest, not a lot happening right now but there's definitely more to come! Thanks, Amber

About Me

Thanks for visiting my site! My name is Amber and I am a graduate student in Computer Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. How did I get to this point? While the complete answer is probably more complicated than even I understand, I can say a few things with certainty.
I studied mathematics at undergrad and there I developed an interest in computer science. I first became interested in those fields that are present in both math and computer science like encryption, logic and computer infrastructure. After graduating, I continued building on my mathematical and technical skills by completing data quality analysis for google maps, building microtasks for a crowdsourcing company, and analyzing data for IP geolocation.
It is that last pursuit, analyzing IP data that piqued my interest in networking. There are a few specific things that I get to see that many other people do not. I like following new networks that get fired up and where. I also find the discovery of new tor networks and proxies exciting.
I believe the virtual world is modified to match our political and economic tendencies. We see networks in Egypt come back online after being silenced for years. We watch as networks in Crimea begin taking on characteristics of their Russian equivalents. We lose traffic in western Europe as more users take advantage of their right to be 'forgotten'. We notice ISPs and telecoms in Asia fighting to gain more IP allocations. When we pull back and look at the internet as a big set of connections we can see it taking on the principles, preferences, and concerns that we've created in our physical world.

Projects

For my final project in undergraduate, I studied a certain type of psuedoprime. Psuedoprimes are composite numbers that appear as prime numbers under certain primality tests. I studied Carmichael numbers which are psuedoprimes that satisfy Fermat's Little Theorem. In particular, I looked at how some Carmichael numbers are constructed as well as the density of Carmichael numbers over the positive integers. (They are very rare). Just like prime numbers and psuedoprimes, Carmichael numbers are infinite. You can read more about Carmichael Numbers here.

Some Project Resources

Understanding prime numbers is an important part of computer science. We use the fact that large prime numbers are difficult to identify in some public key encryption algorithms. We also use factoring to test the ability of our computer systems, just see GIMPS here.

Hobbies

(more like things that I might be doing when not working or schooling or eating or sleeping)

running

hiking

skiing and mountain biking

watching horror movies

cooking or baking

reading outdated periodicals or magazines(usually about a month behind)